


last call

by villanellogy



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: (and eve gets a fake name too), Established Relationship, F/F, Vignette, hints of dark!eve, it's my fic and i say that we don't get to be inside anyone's heads, some good good Small Town Aesthetics™, the return of billie marie morgan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24796555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanellogy/pseuds/villanellogy
Summary: Two women come to town, for a while.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 29
Kudos: 223





	last call

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking a lot about the bystanders we don't get to meet in Killing Eve, and the ones who are left behind—what must they think when they see Eve and Villanelle? What do Eve's coworkers at the restaurant think, when she just up and vanishes one day? What would it feel like to meet them together for the first time? This came out of that, a really shitty day, and my Spotify playlist titled "time to Emote™". 
> 
> Tiny CW for vomit. Just mentioned, nothing graphic.

At ten after twelve on a steely grey Wednesday, two women enter a restaurant after inspecting the “help wanted” sign in the window. 

They are an odd pair at first glance, and second, and third—one nearly a foot taller than the other, owing to a pair of platform ankle boots, and perhaps fifteen years her counterpart’s junior. They ask to speak to the manager, and are soon ensconced in a booth. The taller asks after a glass of water with lemon, and another with ice. She keeps the first for herself, and slides the second to her companion. It has begun to rain steadily outside. They inquire after the job.

The manager slides opposite them onto the vinyl. She asks which of them is applying; they both are. The older of the two, dark hair going frizzy around her temples from the humidity outside, jokes that they are a package deal. There is something sad in both of their eyes. No one else has applied for the vacancies left after the last batch of students scattered, floating on wind currents to universities in the fall. They are hired on the spot.

x

The younger of the two, model-pretty and with gleaming eyes, is adroit behind the bar, charismatic and sweet with customers. She will only take shifts if the other woman, who is serious and sedulous on the line, is also working. Even while on opposite ends of the restaurant, they angle toward each other, as though they orbit around each other, under mutual gravitational pulls. They make frequent eye contact through the window from the dining area into the kitchen. Each night at two after last call, when someone flips the sign on the door so that “Closed” is facing out, the bartender shakes out her blonde hair and pours well drinks for the staff sprawled around the newly cleaned dining room. She presses a gin and tonic into her counterpart’s hand. She always takes a sip of it first, and says that she is checking for poison, and smiles her only genuine smile of the evening. They leave together, night after night, walking shoulder-to-shoulder on the sidewalk, saying very little.

The regulars whisper about them. (This is the type of town where regulars whisper about everything.) The women are each inscrutable for entirely different reasons. The regulars whisper that Billie is an odd name for a woman. The regulars whisper, on a day where the sun outside is blistering hot and the entire staff dons tank tops, that Jenna has a rough red scar slashed across her shoulder blade, and the ghost of an exit wound over her heart. The regulars whisper that Billie says so much without really saying anything at all, weaving a fractured mirage of a life story to whiskey-drenched customers which, upon further inspection, contains nothing tangible. The regulars whisper that they heard from a friend of a friend that maybe the two were married in secret at the courthouse after Thelma-and-Louise-ing it. The regulars whisper that their aunt’s sister-in-law thinks they are in witness protection and are due to testify against the mafia in a few months’ time. The regulars whisper that whoever they are, whatever they are, they do not belong.

No one knows where they live, or even if they live together. On a warm curious evening two months after they arrive, the dishwasher watches after their retreating backs, and follows behind. The next day, he stumbles in through the kitchen door with an array of finger-pad-shaped bruises around his throat, scattered and purpling. Jenna, cutting carrots into even medallions, levels her eyes at him without pausing. Usually a talkative presence in the kitchen, he does not say a word during the entire service, and leaves before last-call staff drinks. The next day, he tenders his resignation. He has decided to begin night classes at the local community college.

They work well. They are paid under the table. Only the manager knows this, just as she knows that Billie’s Balenciaga ankle boots cannot possibly be paid for by her tips garnered from tending bar for insurance agents. She is not in the business of asking questions.

x

Once, the facade cracks. It is three months after they arrive, and the town’s apple festival is the next day. This is the closest this town gets to a bacchanal. The streets are hung with banners, and all the local businesses will be closed. The manager turns up with bottles of prosecco. When they are proffered, the two women decline. The staff wheedle. They share a long look, and Jenna nods, and the two of them spend the next hour trading long swigs of effervescent wine from a bottle they hand back and forth. As usual, they avoid the questions that are put to them, but Billie obliges when one of the line cooks begs her to do the pitch-perfect French accent she sometimes jokes with customers in while pouring glasses of Merlot. Everyone applauds. Someone lowers a basket of fries into the deep fryer, salts them generously, and pours them into a silver mixing bowl which is passed around the room.

When the air in the dining room is thick with booze and laughter, and the analog clock on the wall is ticking on toward three in the morning, one of the waitresses stumbles out to the alley to throw up. She happens upon the two of them, pressed tipsily close and murmuring desperately to each other between deep, drunk kisses. Of course, the regulars, the staff, and everyone in town have all speculated that the nature of their relationship is a romantic one. Still, it is one thing to watch them leave together, and another to see them twined up in each other, Billie’s long, ring-adorned fingers tangled in thick, wild hair which Jenna has let down from the bandana she ties it back with to work. The waitress forgets what she has come out to do for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of Jenna’s hand sliding neatly into the back pocket of Billie’s tight dark-wash jeans.

When she finally retches, the women jump apart, and Jenna rushes to her. Tipsy and unsteady on her feet, she nonetheless holds the waitress’s hair back with a grip that is a little too strong to be comforting. Billie plucks the waitress’s phone out of her pocket and orders her an Uber. In the morning, she has only tattered memories, and a splitting headache. There is a possibility, she thinks, that what she saw in the alley was a particularly odd dream, until the next day when she sees the two of them, hand in hand, buying apples from one of the fifty stalls at the festival. Billie takes a bite from one, and holds it in her cupped hands, and both of them laugh at a joke no one else is privy to.

x

At just after nine on a busy Friday night, another woman that no one in town has seen before slides onto one of the rattan barstools. Several of the regulars eye her close-cropped hair and aquiline features, unsure of another interloper in their midst. Billie, wrestling car keys from a local accountant who is sauced beyond repair despite the early hour, does not attend to her for long moments. When she does, her hands occupied wiping out a snifter glass with a lavender-colored rag, looking up with the usual bartender’s question on her full lips, she stills. She sets the glass down as though in slow-motion, tucks the rag in her pocket, and lays both hands on the chipped bar top.

The woman shrugs off an elegant duster. She speaks with a crisp, clean English accent, sits with impossibly good posture, and orders a whiskey, straight up. The regulars watch as the woman watches as Billie looks, somewhere just this side of frenetic, for Jenna on the line in the kitchen. The woman follows her gaze, meets Jenna’s eyes, and nods once, slowly. Jenna, agitating a sauté pan full of onions and garlic, falters and nearly burns herself.

The woman stays until close, saying nothing but casting disdainful looks to the regulars who attempt to speak to her. She nurses three glasses of whiskey, top-shelf and oak-forward, one right after the other. Billie, who has resumed service with something sober and shaky around the corners of her mouth, informs her with burning eyes that it is last call. The woman smiles icily and tells her that she will be waiting outside.

The staff cleans. Billie pours well drinks. She mixes a gin and tonic and presses it, eyes darting to where the woman is standing by the plate-glass door, into Jenna’s hand. She takes a sip of it first, and she says she is checking for poison, and Jenna drinks it too quickly, ashen and close by her side. They are asked what is wrong, and they wave the questions away. They collect their things. They meet the woman outside. The staff watches through the window as the three figures, bathed in sickly orange glows from the streetlamp, turn slowly and walk away together.

x

The next day, another steely grey afternoon four months after they arrived, the two women are gone. They do not call. They do not formally quit. The waitress, whose hair Jenna once held back, does her best at the bar, but is hopeless at it, and cannot answer when the regulars ask where Billie has gone. The replacement dishwasher is unexpectedly promoted to the line. 

The regulars whisper about them. They whisper that the aunt’s sister-in-law is probably right and they have gone to testify against the mafia. They whisper that the third woman might be a bounty hunter, or an angry ex-wife, or a spy.

Eventually, they stop whispering. One by one, they forget. 

A “help wanted” sign goes up in the window of the restaurant.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i. yes hello thank you for indulging...whatever this is  
> ii. i'm villanellogy on tumblr if you want to say hi!  
> iii. thank u for reading!! let me know what you think!!


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